Here's Paul Baran's RAND-published September 1962 justification for distributed communications networks summed up in a single chart. It's also the same paper where the famous "centralized vs decentralized vs distributed" triptych of graphs comes from. You still see this exact diagram, uncited, in modern presentations on the decentralized/distributed web.

Oh wow. So that really famous centralized vs decentralized vs distributed diagram that I quote above? Well, in one of the companion papers, Baran provides this iteration on it, which in my opinion is far superior and I'm going to start using in my presentations.

@dariusThat's a great base for illustrating other system characteristics like how authority, costs, and complexity are concentrated or distributed

Also hinted at... Networks aren't typically homogenous, by layer or node. You won't get consensus between an urban neighborhood and a rural village on network topology because their needs differ. You could, however, get consensus on hybrid approaches that allow different local topologies